JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference was an annual D.C. fixture, but in recent years, it has gone international. Last week, there was not one but two CPACs in Hungary and Poland, and the range of speakers is a window into the growing global coalition of nationalist movements. NPR's Huo Jingnan has the story.
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HUO JINGNAN, BYLINE: This year, President Trump's second term energized the European CPAC conferences. Here's far-right Austrian politician Herbert Kickl.
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HERBERT KICKL: Fight, fight, fight and knock the globalists out.
HUO: Days before a presidential election in Poland, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem endorsed the pro-Trump, right-wing candidate at CPAC, Poland. That candidate went on to win this past weekend.
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KRISTI NOEM: President Trump knows that the West has the will to survive because of you.
HUO: Nationalist parties didn't always get together so publicly, says Duncan McDonnell.
DUNCAN MCDONNELL: They were literally afraid to be seen together 15 years ago.
HUO: He's a professor of politics at Griffiths University in Australia and studies nationalist and populist parties around the world.
MCDONNELL: And I've interviewed them a lot about this. They thought that their national media would say, hey, you know, you've been seen with Jean-Marie Le Pen. He's antisemitic. He's extreme. Therefore, so are you.
HUO: In just over a decade, what used to be fringe is now on a livestream and includes members of the U.S. government. Among the other speakers this year was Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek who brought up a conspiracy theory that has inspired multiple terror attacks.
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EVA VLAARDINGERBROEK: I wanted the whole world to know that the great replacement theory was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.
HUO: Therefore, she says, all people who are not white need to be expelled from Europe or remigrate to the countries where they or their ancestors were born. The Trump administration has embraced the idea and wants to create an office of remigration in the State Department. Also in the mix were leaders of German and Polish political parties that have used Nazi slogans, symbols and salutes. Heidi Beirich has been watching who shows up at CPAC. She runs the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
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HEIDI BEIRICH: It shows, once again, that the far-right is no longer policing itself from white supremacists, you know, disinformation specialists, extremists, that they're all in the mix.
HUO: Multiple Israelis with ties to its government were also at the conference in Hungary. A goal they share with the other figures - driving out Muslims. Here's Amichai Chikli, minister for diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism. He appeared to refer to a rape case in Paris last year.
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AMICHAI CHIKLI: The 12-year-old Jewish girl in France was not raped by Frenchmen, but by Islamist barbarians.
HUO: The suspects were boys under 15, and authorities have not released information about a nationality or religion. Alice Weidel leads Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany Party, which made big gains in recent elections.
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ALICE WEIDEL: When it comes to the daily horrors of imported migrant violence and Islamist terror on the streets, our chancellor remains silent.
HUO: Like many Trump supporters, the speakers talked about fighting the deep state and globalists, which is often a dog whistle for Jews. Some of the other shared goals include targeting transgender people and elevating the role of Christianity, often in the name of, quote, "defending Western civilization." That idea became more prominent once the U.S. joined the coalition during Trump's first term, says McDonnell.
MCDONNELL: For a long time, they've been talking about defending Europe, but that language didn't work anymore once the U.S. came in. So it made more sense to find a larger umbrella identity.
HUO: More important than the speeches on stage, McDonnell says, is the networking that happens offstage. One thing the Europeans have shown Americans, he says, is how to build and expand nationalist movement over decades. Huo Jingnan, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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